the flesh
by electric caterpillar
Summary: Alexander Anderson nurses his child and his guilt M for frank nudity and mention of torture, no sex


a silly sad thing inspired by my account of yumiko's history + petey and my rp. hi pee!

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The witching hour found Alexander Anderson where he could be found frequently in the evenings of the past twenty years, in the water room of the infirmary which had come to be specially reserved for these twilight occasions, attending with a sputtering candle the prone form of a maiden, snow white, contained in glass coffin of porcelain and perfumed water, still as stone.

Anderson knew this body better than his own — so small, shockingly small, impossibly small, white as snow, white as lilies, white as the moon, these filiform fingers and pink toetips tucked in sleep, this gown of soft black hair cast in a reptilian glisten in the mute pink candle light filtered through the spotted fragrant water, the bisque buttock hovering over the gullet of ceramic basin as angels must hover in the infinite space of heaven.

This lovely little body he had tended for twenty years in its fits of infidelity, in its intense illnesses, the brow he blotted perspiration and fever dreams from, the hands the size of dolls hands he had held and caught and stroked and slapped the wrists of, the depth of breasts and bottom and spots of downy feminine fur which were once not even an mirage on the horizon, the secret center he could sometimes smell where a baby egg blossomed, this entire tiny female form was a labor of love, the labor of his life, with her sister and brother.

She was not beautiful, this plain little lady with billows of black hair like misshapen raven wings, stuttering and stumbling, matronly and infantile, but to Alexander Anderson looking down on the sad calligraphy of her eyelashes recounting dismal dreams, no lovelier creature stood upon God's creation.

Yumiko wiggled a little; she wheezed, she winced, her moon-smooth brow puckered as she suffered in her sleep. Anderson passed his titanic palm across her face and with a hiccup she nestled back into the tentacles of her hair, supported by his knuckles. Her round daisybright fingernails he rubbed clean of coagulated gore. He soothed with the heel of his palm the wounded curve of her shoulder, the distressed dimple that met her breast.

He looked very intently — to not see her indecency, certainly, but more importantly, to not see the clutter of old wounds infecting the baby-pink tummy and pubis, the valley of discolored meat eclipsing her stomach button, the cuts along the thighs tallying hours, the sunbursts of old burns, the word "cunt" in tattered red carved vertically along the pearl-pink perineum. In a way, these were less civil for him to see than her mere nudity.

Passing over these disfigurements lightly, quickly, fearfully, he recalled as always with painful precision the pitch of Yumiko's scream, the evil velocity and color of her sick, the graceful descending arch of her faint like a black swan meeting the water surface upon awakening, saturated in blood, with a shard of human skull at the corner of her mouth - frightened and confused, a kitten turned out onto the freeway, afflicted with the shock of waking in wounds, turning to him, looking to him for decision, for decency, crying, crying, crying.

"Father?" Heinkel stood in the infirmary proper, beyond the boundary of the dark contained cocoon.

"She's fine," he reported softly, "she's not very hurt. She's clean." In fact, he had drained and refilled the bath six times until the water ran clear from Yumiko's hair. He had counted.

"May I come in?" Heinkel asked, and Anderson, recalling the intensity and appetite with which the paladin considered Yumiko's nudity when permitted to nurse her told her gently no, and please see that Yumiko's bed be prepared for her if it wasn't already, and he would dress and deliver the unwell woman himself.

Yumiko stirred a little when he lifted him, and as she lay in a slurry of sticky limbs in his lap being rubbed dry her eyes fluttered open like a thousand butterflies alighting.

"I'm hurt," came her pitiful voice, garbled about tears bubbling up, which pulled a thread stitched in Anderson's breast. He rearranged her small skull on the cushion of his shoulder and kissed a fistful of her lovely hair.

"I know, child," he soothed, and ensconced the softened supple substance of her sighing thighs in the towel down. Like a babe he bundled and bore her up - compared to him, she was a babe. "Shhh… shhh… shhh…"

"Help."

"I am helping. I'm here."

"Father," she cried, unseeing in her sickness, her sadness, her infirm cry, shrill and shy, the cry that would never darken, mature, never become a woman's cry to him — exactly the cry of the child he lifted from the mess of debris and destroyed human flesh, from the fires of Catholic retribution, exactly the cry of the infant baptized in blood he descended from his rage to kiss and comfort a hundred years ago, a million years ago — old though he was, Anderson felt he could never be old enough to remember a time without his children.

"Father," she cried in the dark, but who cried, and to whom she cried, Anderson

did not know.


End file.
